Giant DIY Mouse Sets the Ball Free

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Make the move to a split keyboard and the first thing youā€™ll notice is that you have all this real estate between the two halves. (Well, as long as youā€™re doing it right). This is the perfect place to keep your cat, your coffee cup, or in [Jacek]ā€™s case, your fantastic DIY trackball mouse.

Donā€™t be fooled by the orange plastic base ā€” all the electronics are rolled up inside that big sexy ball, which [Jacek] printed in two halves and glued together. Inside the ball thereā€™s an Adafruit Feather nRF52840 Sense, which has an onboard accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer. As youā€™ll see in the video after the break, the Feather takes readings from these and applies a sensor-fusing algorithm to determine the ballā€™s orientation in 3D space before sending its position to the computer. To send the click events, [Jacek] baked some mouse buttons into the keyboardā€™s firmware. Among the other Feather sensors is a PDM MEMS microphone, so detecting taps on the ball and translating them to clicks is not out of the question for a future version.

Here comes the really clever part: there are two reed switches inside the ball. One is used as a power switch, and the other is for setting the ā€˜upā€™ direction of the trackball. The ball charges wirelessly in a 3D printed base, which also has a small neodymium magnet for activating the reed switches. Check out the demo after the break, which shows [Jacek] putting the trackball through its paces on a mouse accuracy testing program.

If you prefer your DIY trackballs to be more standard looking, click on over to the Ploopy project.



from Blog ā€“ Hackaday https://ift.tt/3cuP6PT

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